CAUTION: Mature Content - some readers may be offended. Synopsis: 'Cokehead' is a semi-regular pulp series chronicling one man’s journey to and from the depths of cocaine addiction including entanglements with Mexican drug police and a trio of knife-wielding pimps in Amsterdam, and life as a second-rate model in Milan, a bartender in Toronto and philanderer everywhere. (You may also be interested in reading Cokehead - Volume 5: The Thing About Sardines.)

I'm higher than I've ever been in my fucking life.

Greece, 1997: I'm splayed on a couch in an Athens apartment, there's a half-naked British model stumbling across the living room with a metal sieve and a substantial sliver of cocaine cut straight from a brick that her boyfriend – out of town and allegedly one of the biggest drug dealers in the country – kept stashed in a large plastic bag on the top shelf of the refrigerator. 

"Don't you think he’s going to notice?" I asked, paranoia swirling into high gear.

"How?" she countered. "You saw the size of that brick."

"He’s a drug a dealer," I said. "I’m pretty sure they weigh shit."

Had I known, two years earlier, that I’d end up in the European prequel to Boogie Nights, I might have avoided the fashion business all together. 

Then again, probably not.

Regardless, I couldn’t have predicted this predicament. (And by predicament I mean being so high that sex with a hot model arguably higher than me was the furthest thing from my mind. Oh, and being in the residence of a drug dealer wanted by Interpol.)

So, hands shaking, I took the sieve and dutifully worked the coke through it onto a plate below. Then, I transferred most of the blow into a large fold and carefully laid out the remnants into a quartet of lengthy lines.

Could we even get any higher?

Wasn’t sure. But we were certainly eager to find out.

So we hoovered what was laid out on the table, grabbed our things, hopped on a rented moped and, with her clutching my waist, raced through the crazed, congested traffic of Athens back to the model hotel.

Upon return, my fiancé was fairly fucking far from impressed.

The fashion business: a vapid, plastic catwalk pitted with pushers, pimps and prostitutes where good men (and women) die like dogs.

Models are whores.

Agents are pimps.

And pushers are, well, everywhere.

There’s also a negative side.

Again, had I been able to predict the pitfalls associated with prancing about in other people’s clothes back on that Mexican beach in ’94, I might not have sashayed into it with such vigor.

Ditto for the blow back on that bastardly beach back in ’93.

Of course, had I known how easy it would be to have sex with beautiful models from various parts of the world, well, I probably wouldn’t have gotten engaged either.

Then again, that never really created much of an impediment. 

Eventually, though, you just get tired of lying.

All the time.

About almost everything.

Truth is, being a callous, coke-sniffing, crotch-humping douchebag is a lot of work – I don’t recommend it.

But it was what it was.

Cocaine.

Hot models.

Me.

An unholy trinity of temptation. 

I am, after all, only human.

And I would pay for my transgressions.

But not yet.

Toronto, 1995: I’m one of a dozen dudes taking part in the Ford Supermodel of Canada contest. I’ve already signed with the agency but was asked by the director to take part in what was, in my opinion, a meaningless competition.

I wasn’t keen.

Why? Because I dislike contests.

Why? Because I never win.

I know – you can’t win if you don’t play.

But I never fucking win.

I didn’t win.

In hindsight, this might have been in part because I told Katie Ford in a pre-interview that I was interested in modeling “because I heard it’s good money.”

Conversely, it might have been because a hairdresser had tied my long hair into a bun for the show. (This would prove to be my second most humiliating hairstyle in my six years as a model. The first? Also during a fashion show in Toronto, after the stylist spun my long hair into Princess Leia buns. Fucking terrible.)

I’m going with the interview.

The women’s winner that night was a delightful 17-year-old beauty named Malin Akerman. You might know her from films like Watchmen, The Heartbreak Kid and Couples Retreat. 

See? Not all models act inappropriately.

I was a terrible model. Slightly stiff, often hungover, always uncomfortable and never entirely sure what I was doing at any particular time. I also lacked the necessary ego to succeed at such an endeavor. You really do need to think you’re great. Or at least be able to project confidence into the work. And although experience subsequently suffocated much of that awkwardness, I’m still far more comfortable behind a camera than I ever was in front of it.

I particularly hated commercial auditions. I was reminded of this recently when I came across a decade-old one-page breakdown for a Toronto casting still tucked into the back of my rapidly disintegrating portfolio. It’s for an IKEA commercial and, under “Notes”, it reads: “You are at an office party filled with really hip, cool co-workers. You may have to dance a bit at the audition.”

You may have to dance a bit at the audition.

Not surprisingly, my first thought was to blow it off. But for some reason, I didn’t.

When I arrived, they ushered a group of us into the small casting room and the director, without hint of humor or music, said: “Give me two minutes of high-energy dance.”

Now, I rarely dance with music. So imagine me carving tile to silence while the director, casting director and client stared stone-faced as the lot of us bounded around the room like idiots.

Fucking ludicrous. 

So I made a creative choice and began whirling around the room whimsically, combining snapping fingers and flailing limbs in what must have looked like some kind of interpretive seizure.

Kind of like the character Carlton Banks from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Only much more dangerous.

Shockingly, I did not get the part.

But that fucking audition tape could still be out there. Somewhere.

It wasn’t all disaster, of course. I once walked into a Budweiser audition in Toronto and the director immediately asked, “How tall are you?”

“Six-three,” I replied.

“Thanks for coming in.”

And that was it. I muttered “asshole” under my breath because I felt like he’d wasted my time. But a couple days later I found out I’d booked the job: A U.S. national commercial called Neighbors that had a two-year run and even played during the NBA finals one year.

I’m the guy with the hat on riding the back of the newspaper truck. I’m onscreen for roughly two seconds (15th to 17th second, to be precise).

And I’m guessing I made close to $30,000 for it. 

Toronto gets stupidly cold in the winter. In fact, during the start of the winter of 1995 (and throughout my subsequent winters while getting my degree from Ryerson from 1998-2002), I frequently questioned why anyone would found a city in that spot.

But at least they had fur coats.

Alas, my modeling contract (and my conscience) explicitly prevented me from donning fur for a fashion show. And on the street, well, I’d just rather not walk around draped in a dead animal.

It kind of makes you look like a total tit.

This meant, of course, that, on occasion (November to April, basically), I would be extremely cold.

Anecdotally, the coldest I’ve ever been in the history of my body was outside of Merritt, British Columbia on the Coquihalla highway. My friend Erich and I had been trailing my cousin Glynn (who was with my friend Pete and a couple of other guys) along the highway in near whiteout conditions. Being that both parties were traveling in Volkswagen vans, the tiny, one-inch by four-inch rectangle that Erich had scraped out of the frost on the inside of the windshield was making it difficult to see Glynn’s beady red taillights up ahead on what looked like a giant luge track.

We did, however, notice that Glynn seemed to be passing a semi-trailer. Glynn pulled ahead and Erich followed. Suddenly, the pair of dimly lit snake eyes on the back of Glynn’s van wavered back and forth then disappeared as the van struck the wall on the right. Erich hit the brakes and we spun into a 180, pirouetting around the front of the semi-trailer, until we were completely facing the trucker in his lane.

I recall seeing large headlights and most of my life flash before me.

Miraculously, we kept going and ended up in a snowdrift in the middle of the highway. The trucker somehow kept his rig on the road and didn’t bother to stop to lend a hand.

I don’t fucking blame him.

We tried to get Erich out of the snowdrift. While doing so, a minivan whipped out of the whiteness and almost took me out.

It had a family inside, and we were all in a precarious position, so we pushed them out first.

Then we got Erich out.

Glynn’s front end was badly pushed into its front right wheel. We managed to get him to safer surrounds and another trucker with a radio called for a tow truck.

Shivering in the snow at the side of the highway, we decided to tap into our supply of beer. So we were feeling fairly optimistic by the time the tow truck finally arrived.

Erich suggested to the driver that, instead of towing Glynn’s van, he attach a chain to the front of it, pulling the damaged frontend from the tire, ostensibly making it drive-able again.

Chain attached, the driver tapped down on his truck’s accelerator.

The metal groaned but didn’t give.

“Hammer it!” yelled Erich.

He did. And the front of Glynn’s van – with Glynn still sitting wide-eyed and suddenly exposed to the elements in the driver’s seat – ripped right off at the wheelbase and opened up like a garage door.  

Everyone, save for Glynn, found this new development to be quite hilarious.

The disabled vehicle was towed to a scrap yard and everyone piled into Erich’s van for the rest of the voyage to the ski hill.

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